Juliana Ripke

The influence of Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959) on composers of Brazilian popular music, especially Antonio Carlos Jobim (1927-1994), has been widely discussed and has practically become common knowledge. Despite this, we have not yet found any analytical works that have focused in-depth on this comparison between the works of the two composers, among other aspects. This section, therefore, is dedicated exclusively to my doctoral research at the School of Communications and Arts of the University of São Paulo (with the support of a FAPESP scholarship) under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Paulo de Tarso Salles. In this research, I study and analyze (using different tools) the various aspects of the connections between the composers Villa-Lobos and Tom Jobim (as well as between Villa-Lobos and composers of Brazilian popular chamber music after him, such as Chico Buarque, Edu Lobo, among others). Here, we can find my articles, arrangements that were made and recorded especially to demonstrate the connections between the works of the two composers, live performances, and in the future the complete thesis.

“One day, later, a foreign record of choros no. 10 conducted by maestro Werner Jansen, a symphonic piece with mixed choir, an erudite work, arrived at my house. When the record started playing, I started to cry. Everything was there! My beloved forest, the birds, the animals, the Indians, the rivers, the winds, in short, Brazil. My tears flowed calmly, abundantly, I cried with joy, Brazilian Brazil existed and Villa-Lobos was not crazy, he was a genius. And I began to understand more of what Mário de Andrade was saying, and I began to study Villa.

[...] One day, maestro Leo Peracchi, my friend and teacher, took me to Villa's house, on Araújo Porto Alegre, above the café on Vermelhinho” (JOBIM, 1987).

“We had to invent Brazil, Brazil didn’t exist. I mean, when I went to invent Brazil, Brazil had already been invented. But people before me had to invent Brazil. Villa-Lobos had to invent Brazil, Portinari... They even had to invent the language. I was talking to our friend, a Portuguese teacher: these indigenous words that we have don’t exist in Portuguese from Portugal. So, we had to make Brazilian music. And that’s it, to say why I did it, it’s very simple: because I was born here” (JOBIM, 1993).